June 21, 2009

Cadaver: Have a Heart; On Second Hand, Have Five

K-horror rarely frightens yet it does regularly disturb. In director Son Derek's Cadaver, the disquieting moments all occur at a teaching hospital where six cocky medical students find their boozy disregard of the Hippocratic oath -- on the eve of getting a corpse for dissection -- will lead to a series of gruesome deaths, all seemingly self-inflicted by a scalpel. As each once-giggly undergrad succumbs to the merciless knife, creepy skeletons emerge from their collegial closets like the inhumane heart transplant done by one student's dad, the necrophiliac longings of another student (who happens to be the mystical son of a funeral director) and the patricide by yet another who has trouble sleeping. (Can you blame her?) As to the inappropriate posthumous grope of the corpse's breast, this may be more medical than criminal. How, after all, does formaldehyde affect the fatty tissue of the tit? Some budding doctors need to know! From what I could tell (and Cadaver can be confusing), one guy (whose worst crime may be two-timing) escapes the curse of the cadaver. As to the rest, they're guilty as charged if less so than the possessed serial murderer among them.